Theme updates, Gutenberg, and more focus
Some of you might know that I started working for Automattic as a Happiness Engineer, about 17 months ago. Since then, I haven't been able to find a lot of time to update my existing themes. One of my new year's resolutions was to focus more on my existing open source projects, and to contribute more to places where I used to. As part of this resolution, and in an effort to be more focused, I moved all of my existing WordPress themes to this site.
Theme update
As part of this process, I dusted off one of my popular themes, Relativity, and updated it to new major version — 2.0. The theme gained support for more Jetpack features like Social menus and Content Options, and core features like Theme logo. I also fixed a bunch of visual bugs here and there, notably with widget areas in the footer, and custom menus. The theme also gained full support for Gutenberg, which is the next-gen editing experience for WordPress. You can view more details about the theme here:
Gutenberg
I've been testing the next generation editor for WordPress for some time, and I'm thoroughly impressed. It fixes a lot of pain points present in the current editor, and gives less chance to crappy theme authors to lock-in people with their less-than-ideal implementation of custom elements(with shortcodes). Although it still has some annoying elements, I think that the improvements are worth the initial pain of switching.
A few weeks ago, I installed Gutenberg on this site, and I must say that I'm super happy with the writing flow. The Gutenberg team is constantly fixing bugs, and if you're serious about he future of WordPress as a publishing platform, you should contribute.
More focus in 2018
This is just the beginning. This year is going to be full of new updates, bug-fixes for existing themes, and probably a new theme as well. I'm also going to focus more on improving skills like css and javascript. I'm looking forward to what this year brings me in form of new stuff to learn, to break, and to work with. See you around. 👋